Float
Spencer Litman

 
After Lily finishes her dope and buries her needle and sooty spoon in her backpack, under all the clothes she owns, dirty and stinking, she stands on the sidewalk that runs along the shore, leaning on the rail, watching yachts meander lazy and aimless in the water. When the sun falls below the horizon, their lights turn on and sometimes, when they’re close, she can hear thumping bass blaring from mounted speakers. Sometimes she sees people milling around on their colossal decks, ants in designer clothes with too much time. She envies the excess: diamonds she believes they wear on bangles and tennis bracelets; pearls handed down six generations, kept in polished teak boxes three-hundred and sixty days a year.

She likes to imagine these people lined on the side of the deck facing the city, looking at her
through platinum binoculars, her hair blown back in the breeze, the city as a backdrop, like she’s its guardian and belongs there permanently among its architecture. She pretends they’re close enough to see more than her silhouette, but too far to see the lines of angry red punctures running the length of her forearms. Too far to see that her hair isn’t shiny from expensive shampoo but slick with accumulated grease and oil. She pulls her sleeves down to her wrists and waves to no one like the act will render her fantasy real. She knows this isn’t true.

Then the last of her high fades like it, too, is floating away from her and she swings her backpack over her shoulder with nothing in it to get her any more dope. She has nowhere to go but she doesn’t cry because it can’t always be this way. She promised herself she’d never regret her decision to leave home. She still doesn’t, even now, when all that’s in front of her is another
stranger’s car, then an alley behind a church she hopes to visit in the daytime where stained-glass mosaics sparkle in sunlight and cast rainbows on the faces of those permitted to enter. 









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About the Author: 
Spencer is an emerging writer in Phoenix where he lives with his wife and two children. He is a
fiction editor with Superstition Review. His work appears or is forthcoming in JMWW Journal,
Ellipsis Zine, Pithead Chapel, Riggwelter Press, and X-R-A-Y Lit Mag. Find him on Twitter
@LitmanSpencer​

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